Many comments were addressed at how the accumulated canon of the Forgotten Realms have not only killed much of the mystery of trying to run a game, but how some GMs end up with confrontational players who undercut their authority simply because they know more about the setting than they do. As one commenter notes: “This is one of the major reasons why I only run homebrew settings. I’m not going to DM a world that my players know more about than I do. Half the point of DMing is that no one knows more about the world than you.”

Such a dilemma can befall any GM, no matter what system or setting they are running. Right now, I’m currently being looked to by my gaming group to run the next slew of adventures in our Star Wars Saga Edition campaign. The original GM took us from Level 1 to Level 13 across an epic storyline set against the Legacy era and now it’s his turn to play. The problem is that while I know my fair share of Star Wars, I’m afraid to try out my neophyte GMing skills against such high standards and with people whose knowledge of the Expanded Universe borders on insane.

To some extent, I think geek devotion towards popular settings breeds a slavish inflexibility, where any deviations from the canon lead people to cry foul. This is ironic, considering the whole point of playing a storytelling game is narrative possibility, and that I think should permit us to not just stray from setting canon, but turn it on its head. Therefore, I think the heart of the problem isn’t that particular campaign settings inherently limit the abilities of the GM, but in how the geek brain part of a player overrides his ability to suspend disbelief and accept a Genasi in Eberron or a Warforged in Greyhawk.

I guess the rub lies in whether players who are more knowledgeable about a given campaign setting can readily accept the credibility of a GM’s writing or his decisions about how the world responds to their characters. Simply put: these players would be able to suspend their disbelief only if the GM can earn their trust and their faith regardless of who knows more about the geopolitics of Khorvaire or the cosmology of the Planes.

Comments

I feel your pain. I felt like an idiot when a brand new player told me how something should happen in my Saga campaign. Of course, this was to help his character. I held my ground, and he did not come back for a second session.

We must think alike, Matthew, I blogged a very similar post a few days ago and have a few extensive ones done in the past. There are a few ways to get around lack of knowledge in content, such as taking your game to somewhere you can make things up.

I read that post! It came up a few days after I wrote this one and I’ve seen several other posts on the subject matter within the same week. It makes me suspect that there’s some kind of weird zeitgeist affect that makes everyone blog on similar lines — I’m beginning to see parallel campaigning emerge this week as a blog topic.

Most people outgeek me on campaign settings, including licensed ones like Star Wars, so its really hard for me to think of anything where ‘non-canon’ stuff becomes immune to canon. Thankfully, I have a decent stride into Eberron that lets me think a few steps ahead of the players in our 4E campaign.

Unfortunately, one of our players is a smartypants lawyer who is still carrying some baggage from previous editions (“Warlocks are always evil!” “The XP budget is inferior to the CR system!”) and is very hard to persuade.